


my bones are calling out your name

by valkyrierising



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Orpheus and Eurydice Lite, guest appearances of some MCU characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 18:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11019000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valkyrierising/pseuds/valkyrierising
Summary: They owe each other nothing and yet, it’s the simplicity of their (non-existent) relationship that makes this so clear. She’s in her bunk, trying (and failing) to get rest; even though she’s not being hunted, that she has SHIELD at her back ones, the nagging persists inside. He rescued her from Hellfire when she dragged him into her life and her battles, it’s only fair that she rescues him from the place that she dragged to his doorstep.





	my bones are calling out your name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ravenkisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenkisa/gifts).



> katabasis: the hero’s or upper-world deity journeys to the underworld or to the land of the dead and returns, often with a quest-object or a loved one, or with heightened knowledge. The ability to enter the realm of the dead while still alive, and to return, is a proof of the classical hero’s exceptional status as more than mortal.

 

 

 

 

i. death

 

What has passed has passed. Things could not be undone and she couldn’t bear it like she had, punishing herself for it. She’d survived before and she would have to continue because there was a job that needed to be done, people that still needed to be saved. There’s a part inside of her that feels whole once she works with SHIELD. Being a SHIELD agent is the crux of her identity -  it’s the reason why she couldn’t leave them, why she couldn’t ever stay gone from them. And she’s tried hardest to escape, to minimize the damage of the last year by staying away. 

 

But, and this was the hardest part, she had to recognize that she couldn’t pin herself as the sacrificial lamb. She was meant to be an agent just as SHIELD was meant to be rebuilt by all of them - by her especially. 

 

Which means that despite everything that’s happened the past year, she’s not one to turn her back on Robbie Reyes even when he’s made it a point that he didn’t do ‘friends.’ Whether he knew it or not, he was a part of her team and she looked out for hers. 

 

There’s a sucker punch that catches her by surprise, feeling the blow that Robbie takes above. The fight above is set closer to the portal, the one she's also helped open that feels like a taut rope she’s holding onto. She stumbles aside, letting Fitz and Jemma catch her as the blowback of her powers returns. It’s less crippling than before, but it’s hard when the powers have taken their toll on her bones in the past.

 

An emptiness around her, a hollow feeling like time has ceased being and it’s waiting for her to catch up. She pushes herself off of Jemma, a tug to go above and ensure the safety of those there. The best way to describe Robbie is that he’s a magnetic pull despite his insistence on restraining his presence. His presence is unnatural and not - a necessary bending of reality and death. His lack of presence is a shock to her as the last few weeks have been the closest she's ever been to walking with the possible literal closest interpretation to Death itself. 

 

It’s feels a lot like the earthquake that’s passed, right before the aftershock hits, for lack of a better description. 

 

Robbie isn’t there, but neither is his uncle and that sense of a vacuum being open envelopes the perimeter as she comes from the underground. She staggers around, an odd energy buzzing about. She thinks Coulson’s lost his mind once he does tell her, but it’s done so matter-of-factly and the  _ tone _ , the one where he’s trying to make bad news not seem as bad with his easy inflection, it’s all she can do to not collapse under buckling knees and break down once more. 

 

There’s an echo in her head ‘ _ not again’ _ as she presses against her palm against her forehead. 

 

Life continues on. 

 

She goes back to base; she continues helping Mace smooth over the new SHIELD image. Coulson seems to have an absurd amount of faith in Robbie returning but with the portal being shut down, the darkhold disappearing, the odds look grimmer by the hour. While his optimism and frankness weren’t unwanted, there’s something bristling inside over leaving Robbie alone, over not being able to help him.  He’s  _ the  _ Ghost Rider, the guy who sold his soul to the devil; it’s stupid to believe that he could die - that she could actually do anything about it. It’s not like alternate dimensions were her area of expertise. She barely understood how to work one let alone how to go about opening one deliberately, but it seemed cruel to let Robbie suffer somewhere along when they had been the ones dragging up the past - that that they would leave Robbie’s fate to the universe a special kind of cruelty.

 

She survived, partially by her own wit and partly because of him. She protected other Inhumans on the run if possible and even though he wasn’t one, wanted nothing to do with her until she wore on his edge, that she made herself his problem that he became an invaluable ally. Whether anyone wanted to admit or not, Robbie kept her alive and allied himself with her when he had no reason to do. That was a debt that couldn’t be repaid. It was stupid and the attachment was absurd but it was what it was. It went against the core of her being to leave someone to the fates when her last few years have been at the mercy of the universe putting her in right places at the wrong times, placing her friends in wrong places at wrong times.

 

She knows the risk assessing Mace has been doing, groaning at all of this circus to cut losses and minimize time spent on dead ends and Robbie was among them. Besides, he’d say, they needed everything to curry back favor in the intelligence community and the world. The Ghost Rider would set them back. They barely survived the HYDRA snafu, but they shouldered on. This time the odds were a little bit better with Mace and his scary good public relations team but still - it itched. 

 

She swears to whatever higher being is out there that she’ll do what she can to get him back home 

 

 

***

 

 

She does what she can with Mace, pulling what little favor she has to look out for Gabe. 

 

“He’s my responsibility,” she says. Mace nods, waves her off. He’s far more interested in other business than her now that she’s no longer a fugitive, and continuing his PR tour as they continue whatever damage control is necessary after her return. It’s not like she wasn’t already planning on returning, she was never going to continue running away from  _ them _ , because with them the world is right and she can do something about the injustices; it’s about as natural to her being as breathing. But  _ he _ was important as well.  

 

She’s got his keys in her hand, the directions she was given from an agent that looked at her like he wanted to say something else. 

 

She clutches them, the grooves of the key imprinting on her palm like a brand as she takes the driver’s seat and guns it back towards Gabe. His house. Sadness chokes her on the third step, the nerves threatening to shake her nerves before she even knocked. She steels herself, gathering what courage she could find to tell Gabe the news. It feels awkward to tell Gabe that there is a 75 to 25 percent chance that his brother’s coming back. But those are the good odds, and she feels that he deserves this.

 

And he - he takes it about a little better than expected. No child should be left alone, clawing at her too wide heart as her empathy drives her to an edge. It hurt her to see him all alone. There’s an unspoken hatred in his eyes, when he finally looks up, that causes her to look away because she also owes him that much. Even if it was strictly in the family drama between them, her presence shook things from crevices that were better left untouched. 

 

She can’t say she blames him, but she doesn’t let it carve her up and leave her empty and worthless like before, as if she couldn’t do anything. If anything, that’s her drive: to make sure that Gabe had Robbie back. 

 

“Do you have...anyone else that could help? Because we can always station agents,” she asks, watching as he turns over the keys of the Charger. Her own nails dig into the marks left on her palm, the pain reminding her the hours behind.  

 

“I have a friend,” he whispers hoarsely and her heart breaks once more, another crack to her barely healing heart she’s never been able to mend. 

 

“I’ll keep them around, just in case,” she adds quietly. She doesn’t know what to do besides stand there awkwardly, and while it could work, she knows that family is dear to the Reyes boys. It seems particularly shitty that all Gabe has dealt with is loss and suffering, he’ll be hurting for a long time more still. 

 

Despite it all, she leans to hug him. In a surprising move, he accepts the hug, the earlier hatred as he slumps in her arms. She tells herself that it’s the shock that’s in his system, that he wouldn’t have sent her another look if she left. Still no one should ever be alone with this.

 

What she knows is this: what she told him back in the plane was true, how knowing someone was gone leaves an ache in your chest that threatens to swallow you whole before it abates into something tolerable, more manageable. But for the first few weeks, there’s nothing anyone would rather do than crawl into the nearest hole and cry everything out. It never gets easier but it always hurts, and it hurts children like no other. There’s something particularly cruel about Gabe’s particular set of circumstances, his innocence cruelly cut down from the beginning and relentless. And he’s a smart kid, knows he could do great things, but right now he needed familiarity - something solid.    

 

She wouldn’t accept the fact that Robbie was simply gone, not when he was given the shittiest lot in life, not when the Reyes boys deserved none of what happened to them. 

 

She speaks foolishly and sudden. “I won’t stop looking for him and bringing him back, you have my word.” She didn’t want to offer him false hope but it’s all she has to offer. 

 

Gabe looks at her like she’s crazy but even if she had to storm hell herself to bring him back, she would find a way. He looks at her as she presses the keys into his hand before she leaves. 

 

“I’m gonna get you back,” she promises, walking back as she watches the house. “Even if it kills me,” she looks back one more time as she cracks her knuckles, walking towards the nearest bus station.  

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

ii. the descent

 

Mace grumbles, and he’s kind of annoyed at them still being stationed down there, but there’s still something in Los Angeles that they have to do - since she’s rejoined, she’s realized that the lanyards actually mean something and blue is pretty much lowest tier possible, which is what she gets for bailing on SHIELD but this is … excessive.  It’s a really good thing that Mace is still preoccupied smoothing over an Inhuman-Human alliance that she’s able to get him to pull away one agent to watch after Gabe. 

 

“What the fuck,” she mutters one day. She’s a distance from the Reyes house, fiddling with her search results. Following their alternate dimension dealings, more started popping up worldwide, the news tracking the portals opens and closing. It wasn’t anything wide because they were dispensed of so quickly, but there was chattering about. A man calling himself Doctor Strange and a flying cloak reported around him seemed to save the day. 

 

There was way too much weird shit all at once. She didn’t even wanna touch whatever the fuck Radcliffe and Fitz had done in the creation of AIDA that  _ that  _ happened, but it’s not like there was anything she could to stop it.

 

Jemma’s harder to get to accustomed back because of what happened with them, but she's so glad to have her back and the other woman is so happy to see her, it makes her mad at herself for staying away so long. She doesn’t confide in her newest mission however, not wanting to get her in any trouble if it came down to it. Jemma was at a higher ranking than the rest of them and she knew that from the brief parts she caught of Elena informing her of what she missed that Jemma and Mace were at odds with each other regarding the rest of them taking on unsanctioned missions. But Mace, fortunately, trusts her and leaves her to her own devices for the time being that she is well underway getting closer to someone who could help her find Robbie.

 

She scoffs at her screen one afternoon, tipping the ice of the cup into her mouth, “That’s one hell of a trip.”  

 

There’s a tapping at the window that startles her, ice sliding down her neck as the cup is jostled and she swears. Surprisingly, it’s Gabe at her window. She rolls the van window down, eyebrow raised in question against his.

 

He cuts her a look as they both let beats of silence pass by. Even though she was supposed to be on a mission doing recon around Los Angeles, she doesn’t think the director would take too kindly to her going to East Los Angeles versus the canvassed area by Downtown. And she had no idea what Gabe was going to think.

 

“You know for a second here I thought you were a child predator because I’d never seen your van,” Gabe says, voice dripping in sarcasm as she lowers her spiked heart rate. Shifting the seat back up so she could be at eye level, she rolls her eyes. She knocks the laptop a lit bit towards  him without making it seem as if was on purpose.

 

“I’m offended at the implication that my van is a creepy predator van like it’s brown,” she begins as he continues his assessment on her. He has the classic Reyes smirk that she could easily match to Robbie’s, a weird feeling settling inside of her before she pushes the thought away. “Number two, did you already get out of school?” She looks at Gabe, to really assess what was up with him.  He didn’t look any better but he didn’t look any worse. 

 

It’s the smaller victories, she thinks, that are a blessing.

 

“You don‘t have to be here,” he answers instead. She nods before she continues forward.

 

“I fucked,” she censors herself at the last minute despite Gabe’s nonchalance at her cursing, “shit - I ruined your life. The least I can do is this,” she points him to her laptop screen. 

 

“A man flying around with a cape is going to be … helping me?” 

 

“No, smartass, read further.”

 

“The occult?”

  
“Well your brother did sell his soul to the devil so…,” she trails off. She focuses on the hula girl on her dash, the rhythmic swaying keying towards her own heartbeat as Gabe continues reading screen. She follows his eyes, tapping lower to let him read more of what she’s pulled together. Their silence feels less tense than the previous times, but it’s a layer of awkward she doesn’t know to unpack.

 

“Why are you doing this?” He asks. She knew it was absurd for her to be this invested, knew that agents in closer situations were pulled for less, but if he could fight off whatever the Ghost was inside him for Gabe, the least she owed him was to try to bring him back. 

 

There was so much bothering her. That he had a family, a younger brother to look out for, that families torn apart stung her like no other - it was also the judgement of her soul, the refusal to kill her even though it was a present and a smarter option. She also knew that everything to do with him also had everything to do with all she lost, casualties that could’ve been prevented had she been less forward, less trusting,  _ more  _ prepared. She’s not about to unload all this on the poor kid, but they’re thoughts that she hasn’t voiced ever rattling around inside. 

 

“He was a friend when I didn’t have many.” Barring their first meeting but again, things were better off unsaid, that Gabe shouldn’t have to know. He’s quiet for a few moment before he begins to wheel off. 

 

“Don’t be such a creep though.” 

 

She pulls a face at him as he looks back one more time, earning a grin. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she snarks back

 

He stops by every few days, knocking at the window. 

 

“You know when you first showed up, I genuinely thought you were some girl that Robbie had met. And I was here thinking, you must have been something else to get his attention since he doesn’t care for anything that isn’t his car.”

 

“Well, I got his attention,” she mutters, pressing a sandwich she’d gotten extra for him as she refreshes her pages. “Just not the kind any of us was expecting.”

 

“So you’re an actual Inhuman? The first?” He asks between bites. 

 

“I don’t want to say first because there were more before, but I was technically the first publically named one.”

 

“And you can make earthquakes.” 

 

“I can.” 

 

“Does it hurt?”

 

“Only if I overdo it. But that’s what I have these for,” she points at the bottle to the right of her boot. 

 

He nods, okaying this informal interrogation. They never say much to each other but she shows Gabe what she has. Sometimes he looks at her strangely, always like he wants to say something but holding back. She thinks he’s tired of her and her overbearing presence, even though she was a respectful 200 yards from his place. At this point, one might have called her search obsessive given that her boolean searches kept repeating with no new results. The definition of insanity was doing the same thing expecting different results.

 

But somewhere between the two of them and their interactions, there was still hope; that she would find a way, or that he’d storm out of wherever he went and appear like he hadn’t been gone. 

 

 

*** 

 

 

They owe each other nothing and yet, it’s the simplicity of their (non-existent) relationship that makes this so clear. She’s in her bunk, trying (and failing) to get rest; even though she’s not being hunted, that she has SHIELD at her back ones, the nagging persists inside. He rescued her from Hellfire when she dragged him into her life and her battles, it’s only fair that she rescues him from the place that she dragged to his doorstep. There’s no doubting that the Reyes showdown would have been settled, possibly later, maybe earlier; maybe at the cost of his soul, killing his own family. She knows the pain all too well but it doesn’t explain: why does the Ghost Rider mean anything to her? She ponders this, waiting for sleep to finally catch up to her.

 

There would be no simple answers, but if she could do one thing - anything really - after her months of exile, she wanted it to be something worthy of re-embracing herself, that brought out the best of her: her stubborn refusal to let anything go. 

 

 

***

 

 

Sharon Carter was not an easy woman to get a hold of. Having her face plastered all over the agency as a liaison asset to the Avengers, but mainly working for the CIA and the niece to their really recently passed founder - Sharon was going to be a busy woman. Well that, and there were some charges slapped on her that she had helped Captain America, but the super friends breaking up were the furthest thing from her mind and Sharon’s own involvement was still being cleared up. She had so much red tape on her own and she found out that she was better off trying her own hand to get a meeting with Sharon. 

 

Being Sharon Carter’s unexpected pool buddy that one time she met Triplett’s cousins had its perks. 

 

Plan B was worming her way to the director’s side to be placed on the inhuman-human summit that they wanted to get started with people in DC. Inside she wanted to scream because she knew that the odds they would receive a warm welcome were incredibly minimal. Unfortunately, Mace thought that was a superb idea.

 

He let her go forward as their model and she was shocked, because in retrospect it was possibly the shittiest idea.

 

_ “No, no,” he pulled her to the side when he reveals to the others that she’s going to the summit, “it’s a brilliant idea because you are one of our top agents. Vigilante justice aside, this is your chance to really show them that  _ that  _ Daisy Johnson.” _

 

She pressed her lips tightly in remembrance, certain Mace would probably lock her on base and rescind all the color stripes if there was even a leak of this side mission to him.

 

Sharon’s waiting at the restaurant by the time she makes it to DC and leaves her things at the hotel room. She’s dressed practically: slacks, a white shirt and a navy jacket with her hair loose. She looks down at herself, cream top, jeans and a leather jacket and shrugs. It wasn’t a formal formal meeting and besides, it’s not like Sharon would really give a damn she hadn’t followed dress code.

 

“Hi Daisy,” the other woman smiles as she gets to her table, standing to give her a hug. Even though they’d known each other briefly, Triplett bringing them all together on one of their rarer vacation days eons ago, Sharon was the most trustworthy woman Daisy knew. Also she was really fucking good at pool that they gave Trip a run for his money that afternoon.

 

“Hey Sharon,” she returns the hug, squeezing before letting go. 

 

“Sit,” Sharon commands, waving for the waiter that’s milling at another table for them to get seated, “You wanted to see me?” They order quickly, waiting for the waiter to get back inside before she tells her. 

 

“I really wouldn’t be asking this if I didn’t think it was important,” she begins, watches as Sharon folds her hands and leans forward. “But do you think you can get me a meeting with Stephen Strange?” 

 

“The guy with the cloak?” She says, lowering her voice as the waiter comes out with their food. “I can try. I know he’s on our list of potential recruits that’s technically not supposed to exist but you know how government officials get with the potential threats and assets lists” 

 

“All those guys in suits running around collecting whoever has powers owes it protection when they’re looked at with fear?” She raises an eyebrow, taking a bit of her sandwich as Sharon spears a pasta piece into her mouth. 

 

“Yeah, those guys,” she concedes, chewing a few moment before she nods. “I can get you something better. I can tell you where he works and you can find it. Bear in mind, he’s...a handful. And I worked with Tony Stark.” She pulls a face, Sharon’s laughter bubbling as she imagines a scenario with those two in a room. 

 

“Guys with capes tend to be spell egotistical bullshit from a mile awhile,” she fires back getting a nod-inhale combination.

 

“Now multiply that by being regarded as the best, if not the greatest, neurosurgeon within the western hemisphere.”

 

“Men,” she rolls her eyes in annoyance, earning another bubble of laughter from Sharon. “I really hope you won’t need him because I might knock him out,” she says, finishing a bite as Sharon shakes her head in quiet bemusement. They spend at least half an hour catching up, herself apologizing for missing the funeral for the founder as Sharon puts her hands on hers, knowing about the plane and Lincoln from the news.

 

“It’s our line of work,” she says, remembering everything monthly. It’s not as bad as it used to be, the bitterness fading as did the feeling of ash that closed up her throat and made her sick with despair in the beginning. She’s slowly beginning to get better, thinking of it with less guilt and more of how to prevent them from happening again. No one would be dying on her watch if she could prevent it. 

 

“It doesn’t mean we should get used to it,” Sharon says, clasping her hand tighter. 

 

“I know,” she says, pulling her in for another hug once they stand.  They part as she leaves to prepare for the afternoon closed door briefing. That was the better part of this whole trip in that the suits decided to keep it closed. Less media meant less time to get flustered and inevitably getting trapped in an ‘aha!’ moment. What it came down to is they absolutely did not trust an Inhuman team nor a rogue agent turned back to the side of good. 

 

Which, while justified, still stung. 

 

But what wasn’t justified was questioning the integrity of the rest of her team or of the other Inhumans they kept in contact with as assets. 

 

“We’re risking our asses just by even being in the registry,” she fumes, careful to temper her tone but letting the accusatory notes slip past. “And you really have the audacity to think we’d turn in a heartbeat? No one plans for that. Things happens. Priorities are rearrange and while we love this country and do our best to protect it, you can guarantee that if you had powers and someone wanted to hunt you down for that, you would be uneasy as hell being on a list that could be accessed by talented hackers. Which, let me tell you,they’re getting a bit more easier to find when you have clusters of them than your lone hacker nowadays.” 

 

The session adjourns and she’s certain that when Mace gets the cliff notes she’s going to be in so much trouble. But she can’t find it in her to give a damn, searching for the nearest way out of DC towards New York. She pulls out her laptop once more to continue her searching, hanging out in the deep web that talked about Strange and his adventures (she really had gone ghost once she left SHIELD, knowing that whatever popped up she’d try to help and they’d be even closer on her trail than she wanted it to be). 

 

They say something about the Sanctum Sanctorum, something that’s inaccessible except to those chosen, and at the end of this investigation she wants to strangle Stephen Strange for complicating her job infinitely more. She skips a flight to grab a train, sleeping her way through it. 

 

 

***

 

 

 She wakes minutes before they enter New York, the darkness of the night and the speed creating a space of  blurring darkness. The inky blackness of the night as she looks out the window reminds her of the sleekness of his Charger, of his blackness. She winces when she lingers on the memory, her guilt complex an aggravating nuisance as she fights to remind herself to shove it of.  She finds her way towards this Strange guy’s apartment, looking at the overpriced area aghast. 

 

“Oh  _ jesus _ ,” she mutters to herself as she looks at the doors, steeling herself to walk in and speak to the concierge. It’s all easy enough, a little bit of playing a flirty ditz, a little bit of the concierge being a man and her being a pretty damn charming person when it needed to happen. Getting to the apartment is another thing, the elevator ride up going for ages. 

 

She doesn’t know what to do besides wait, checking on her phone. It’s an hour, and she expects a lot longer, leaning against the wall and dozing off some more. She’s been feeling the exhaustion of months on the run catching up to her in the past few weeks, the fatigue digging in and making her tired. She’s dozing off against the wall until the ding of the elevator brings her back to the present. 

 

A woman, walking to her apartment, causes Daisy to sigh as she recognizes she’s still going to be waiting longer. Half an hour passes as she spends the time playing a game of cards she downloaded years ago to help calm her down - which is stupid because all it’s been doing before now raised her blood pressure - but it surprisingly does the trick here. 

 

The first thing she notices is he’s absurdly tall, like not scientifically possible to be that tall. The second thing she notices is he has douchebag vibes around him. This guy, she knows it’s the Strange man, because he’s stopped and looking at her, trying to see if he could make out. She holds her hands up in a placating gesture, not trying to aggravate him. 

 

“You’re that agent from SHIELD,” he begins, watching as she edges away from the door before moving forward. “The Inhuman vigilante.” She resists the urge to roll her eyes, nodding instead.

 

“That would be me,” she says dryly. 

 

“May I ask what you’re doing out my home on a late Tuesday evening?” He asks, opening his door while she waits from the hallway. “Well?” He nods, pointedly gesturing in. 

 

“You’re just gonna let me,” she begins, unsure to be incredulous or shocked at his potential stupidity. 

 

“Miss - ?” 

 

“Daisy,”

 

“Miss Daisy, I can guarantee you, if you meant me harm I would’ve been done with you by now.” She cuts him a look, unsure of her  _ own  _ stupidity if it turned out she went into a trap where the only person who knew where she was, was Sharon. He met her own incredulous look with one of arrogance, finding herself rolling her eyes before acquiescing. 

 

“I have a mystical problem,” she begins, stepping over the threshold, feeling a weird surge of energy course through her. Magical security wasn’t too bad, but still a risky move. “We opened a portal to hell and someone got dragged in. Is there any way that can be undone?” 

 

She doesn’t want to throw the Ghost Rider information when she doesn’t even know the man or how long he’s worked. It took her a while to get used to other Inhumans and that side of her being once she underwent terrigenesis, but she still needed to tell him enough so he wouldn’t waste her time if he didn’t. “I heard you’re the best,” she adds, shrugging as she stands besides a coat rack. 

 

He scoffs, but there’s pride in his posture as he straightens up. Guys were so easy to predict; she watches him move about the apartment, the shifting of the space expanding as he does. He pulls out a book from the shelves, working silence with the occasional muttering. Her eye is caught by a swishing from the corner, the cloak dancing around him.

 

“That’s fucking weird,” she mutters, as the cloak hovers around him protectively “Has anyone told you that?” The cloak seems to snap at her, causing her to resist the urge to use her earthquake powers before reminding herself it’s a piece of annoying fabric.

 

“Ms. Johnson please refrain from the running commentary as it distracts me from assisting you so you can leave my presence,” 

 

“Wow,” she mouths at his back. “Look, can you help or not?” 

 

“Can I? The question isn’t can I. It’s why should I?” He says, still going through the book, back to her. 

 

She shuts her eyes, resisting the urge to use her powers just to fuck with him or strangle him - whichever one was easiest at the moment. 

 

“Why’d you take the cloak?” She throws her hands up. “Why did you save New York?” He turns to her, folding his hands as she sighs again.“Because somewhere, there’s a part of you that isn’t a complete asshole and wants to do good. For god’s sake, your file proves as much.” 

 

They’re silent at a bit, her lack of sleep colliding with her irritability at thought of Robbie spend another minute in hell. 

 

“Of course you have a file on me,” he sniffs...like he’s offended? She battens down the urge to strangle him to let him finish. He doesn’t, looking at the book still.

 

 

“I’m here until Sunday.” she steps back, towards the threshold. “If you change your mind. I won’t come back if you say no.” 

 

Daisy leaves the apartment of Doctor Strange, the sinking feeling that she has tried to bury these past few weeks unraveling. 

 

An unknown numbers texts her as she boards the train from Penn Station back to DC. She blinks, watching as the message is there:  **I can get your portal open this Friday evening. Wear something you don’t mind being ruined.**

 

She scoffs, laughter bubbling up as she locks her phone again. It actually fucking worked. The hum of the car she’s in, the noise of the train on the tracks lulls her to sleep, the hope that she’s been chasing attainable after all. 

 

 

***

 

 

The DC situation doesn’t get any better until at least Thursday. They spend Wednesday going over what was already known, about the HYDRA revelation none of them had known until it was too late. They’re more wary of her now than they were but she couldn’t stop the snapping when their unwillingness to accept Inhumans was the cause of all their problems, and organizations like the Watchdogs did nothing more but incite more paranoia and fear. She recounts everything about the HIVE incident in vivid detail, to all these suits. They didn’t know anything about it beyond being a classified event and having her debrief was almost traumatic in composing her memories. She remembered everything that happened, the people who sacrificed themselves to save her, that pain making its way into her story. She told them of the expedition to Maveth that lead to this but removed Jemma’s trauma from the story to keep her safe, choosing to omit those details about her and the astronaut. She keeps Andrew’s Inhuman identity out, but mentions his loss. She also mentions Lincoln as an Inhuman who’d given his life to protect others, making it clear that Lincoln did everything he could to protect everyone. The end of the session is called by the recorder - who looks like he’s about to cry.

 

She exits first, the stuffiness of the room suffocating her through the day. Fingers running through her head, she works to regulating her breathing by the furthest corner of the hall. 

 

A woman in a neatly pressed suit comes to stand in front her,extending her hand to Daisy. “Thank you for telling us this. I can’t imagine that it’s gotten any better.” 

 

“It is what it is,” she nods, tearing up as she thinks of her friends once more. The woman does nothing besides hold her for a few second before stepping back. It’s enough that at least someone in this hearing had felt something about what the Inhumans suffered in the last year. 

 

Thursday has the briefing tie itself together and on Friday, they would give a rough idea of what their upcoming plan was. It would still be months before they got the paperwork ready, but hopefully with her testimony of what happened and her story about what happened, it would be enough to allow SHIELD resources they were blocked from for the sake of everything.

Friday’s a blur as her only focus is getting the train out to New York and getting Robbie back. She knows that this is important and schools herself back into her neutral agent face, but there’s an energy inside that wants to leave the building immediately.  She leaves as soon as their session is called, making sure to make nice so as to not arouse any suspicion but the ticking countdown in her head grows louder, heartbeat spiking as she just barely makes the train. 

 

They have to wait until midnight to get anything done; he tells her that it’s because the veil between worlds is lowered blah blah some other shit she didn’t bother paying attention to because the occult was  _ really  _ not her specialty. He also moves them from his place to a horribly shitt _ ier  _ area of New York she wouldn’t have guessed that the Sanctum was based in 

 

“This may be uncomfortable,” he tells her and it’s not out of caring for her wellbeing but more to get her prepared. She cuts him a look, wiggling her fingers and the gauntlets she had packed in her hands before she went to DC. “You need to know what you’re going into. We’re not going to be in this world; the laws of reality and physics don’t matter in this plane. This is the universe it’s all its infinite chaos.”

 

“I think I can manage,” she rolls her head, snapping the gauntlets on her hands.

 

“Your funeral,” she hears him mutter before the chanting starts. His own hands begin to emit a ghostly light, the sight captivating as a slit in the air began to form. Like fabric being sliced with a penknife, there’s a stark blackness before it fades into a deeper shade of blue. It’s in a span of a few seconds but it feels like an eternity; time doesn’t even feel like it’s happening - a preternatural stillness to this area. moving into a ghostly cathedral esque building. The Sanctum whatever the fuck he had called it is somewhere she can’t take in. The temple reminded her of what she thought looked like a Buddhist one and she can’t help but wonder what in the hell was up with this shit basing themselves off Asian locales. Jiaying and her Afterlife she understood but this was  just absurd. She rolls her eyes, rubbing absentmindedly at her gauntlets. They step inside before he began his chanting again, another vortex forming in front of her eyes.

 

“Your friend, do you know where he went?”

  
“No,” she shakes her head. “It was just said to be a hell dimension.”

 

“That narrows it down,” he murmurs. She bites back a deeply annoyed inhale. 

 

And then it begins to form, the weirdness once more. The air shifts, like someone cut out a piece and moved it aside. The very feeling of reality seems to fade as he reaches into the vacuum around them and pulls more vortexes. She gets the faintest sense of vertigo before focusing on hands, watching as he brings them closer. 

 

There’s a wild whispering all around in her mind, but tilting her head she feels it as the universe and everything else. There’s screaming, yelling, joyful laughter, every emotion playing out in her head. 

 

“It talks,” he says by way of explanation. She nods. 

 

It’s a little bit like opening a window - except in their case, they were also going through the window and things try to kill them when it happens. The scenery is always something different, she has to give the universe style points on that. With the hell dimensions, Strange chants something far more guttural sounding, like a growling as he pulls them up. 

 

They could be the personification of death itself with life rotting all around, or it could be a post-apocalyptic society with killer-anythings. This part of the universe seemed to rattle in her bones, the absolute coldness and darkness that they were part of it embedded into its being. 

The worst, she comes to find out, is when there’s nothing beyond dirt and a dirty grime coating the air because that usually meant something worse was lurking around the corner. A minute feels like years but she’s certain that they’ve been here for longer than an hour but can’t be too sure. He keeps pulling vortexes up and locking them immediately once they jump back out. She watches him drag dimension after dimension to them and pushing her ahead before following. He looks perplexed when she rubs one arm absentmindedly, until she realizes he hasn’t seen her quake powers in action. 

 

Something slams him down, stumbling into her. She shoves him to the side real quick, throwing her hands in between, jerking at Strange to move them out real quick. 

 

“Negative on fucking destructive sludge substances,” she curses as he drags her out of the area. “Been there, done that.” He scoffs before nodding. 

 

“Your powers, how connected are you to them?” 

 

“If I don’t have these and I use it for too long, I can shatter the bones inside.”  He makes a noise of agreement, continuing his whole… magical thing.

 

Their latest portal is into a Mad-Max esque world, time stuck in a perpetual twilight except for the chain-links and a cage making up the rest of their surroundings. 

 

There’s an air horn cutting through the silence, a loud booming voice going through. 

 

“Come on, come all, and see the magnificent Ghost Rider damn spirits to hell!” a demented voice comes through the arena

 

“Oh shit,” she breathes as she seems a stampede coming at them and cutting through them all with the chain is the Ghost Rider. 

 

Strange and her are separated. The last thing she remembers before telling him to run is the stampede rushing at her, yelling at Strange to get the hell out. A blow to her head leaves her down for the count. Stumbling, the harshness of the world and stampede kicking up dust causes her to blink rapidly while spots begin to cloud at her. She falls to the ground, a strange soft earthy clay as she waits for these creatures to crush her to death. 

 

  

***

 

 

 She wakes up on the ground, the heaviness of her head weighing on her and the feeling of her head waddled up in cotton reminds her of her reality.

 

“Oh fuck,” she exhales, getting off the ground. They’ve taken her to a type of prison-hold area, bars making cells where all types of creatures wandered miserably. A few were peering at her through them, noses pressed to their bars as they saw the closest thing to a human they’d seen in a while as they were rarities. The rattling unnerved her, one of the creatures banging against the bars with a neatly picked bone that was pristinely white. That’d been here for a while. 

 

“She’s awake,” a booming voice picks up again. Head darting, she tries to find where this godforsaken world had the time to install high definition speakers until she realized that the voice was coming from above and no, in fact, there weren’t speakers everywhere.

 

“Welcome to Arcade’s World of Terror!” the hysterical high pitched voice comes up again. “Come one, come all, and watch these creatures fight for their lives for your entertainment.” The cage doors open one by one, herself stumbling to standing, checking to make sure the gauntlets were in place. 

 

A cannon goes off, the entire group running out into this demented race track/cage match combination arena. She waits the crowd to thin out, double-checking, triple-checking the gauntlets. Leaps ahead of the others, the powers harmonizing with the gauntlets to add to her momentum. She lands ahead of them all, skidding to a halt as the loud jeering that had gone around goes deathly silent.

 

Then all hell breaks loose, ducking out of the way as the creatures rush at her; she’s the target, they’re the hunters. The sound of this Arcade yelling out in between her ducking. She doesn’t punch unless they’re too close. She blesses herself for having the foresight to get the gauntlets, allowing her to shove the creatures leaping at her towards each other. The ground shakes and cracks underneath them all, giving her the edge to push herself away from the others, shoving them to each other as she tries to find her way out. 

 

A distorted creature - a bit of a zombie, a bit of an animal, rushes towards her when she’s trying to look around for Strange and his portal magic. “Shit,” she hisses, the tusks of this creature growing prominent as it attempts to cross the gap between her and them. The others begin to see through the distraction plan. She stomps on the ground, her hands stretched to crack the ground. She’s getting ready to really break the terrain of this world when a haze of flames goes up in front of her. It dies down the slightest bit, the chain it comes with wrapped around this zombie-warthog abomination before flaming on once more. The fire engulfs it and leaps towards her, but strangely a pleasant warmth of heat versus the scorching burn she expected.

 

“Robbie?” she yells through the arena. The crowd is stamping its feet now, the stomps rattling the world. 

 

“Here we have an Inhuman and the Ghost Rider folks, place your bets now!”

 

The Ghost looks at her like it’s trying to picture where he might have known her, moving past her to the rest of the creatures. “Robbie!” The Ghost Rider is still focused on the other things, all but ignoring her now. 

 

A creature gets the jump on her, knocking her to the ground just as the Rider swings back towards her with the chain of fire getting ready to arc towards her. Acid drips from the monstrosity baring its teeth at her, swinging her head out of the way to let the acid hit the floor. A hissing, sizzling noise fills her nostril, swinging her arm real quick to blast the thing from her face. 

 

The Ghost Rider tilts the head in acknowledgment, as if it can finally pinpoint her presence as it lets the chain fly. 

 

“Robbie!” She blasts more creatures from them, creating a radius that kept a few in as the Rider twisted the chain, creating a lasso straight out of hell. She wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but it was really fucking cool. The Rider and her make easy work of the creatures, herself going closer to them to lure them in and spinning out of the way as soon as she heard the whip-whip of the chain in the air. 

 

“Robbie!” She yells once more as the creatures numbers decimate, Arcade getting increasingly angry at them being the last two standing and not fighting. This was her last shot of getting Robbie out of here, to get him to come out instead of the Ghost. 

 

“I need you to come back,” she says, quaking the arena around them. A few feet from them in this arena, she sees the tearing of this reality happening. “We need to go!” The giant flaming skull unnerves the shit out of her, but she shoves at his shoulders anyways. 

 

“Gabe needs you!”

 

A key turns in the Rider’s head, the faintest fading of Robbie’s face come back. A few feet from them, a tear becomes a hole - Strange returns, watching with wary eyes as the Ghost begins to recede and the man comes back out

 

“The spirit of Vengeance?” Strange yells at her just as Robbie looks at her with confusion. She shakes her head, grabbing at his arms and gesturing him to move.

 

“Long story!” she jerks her head. 

 

“Daisy?” His face looks haggard, eyes even harder than the day she’d shown up in at the junkyard. It’s a testament to this place being another layer of hell if it could make him look like this, a look she never wanted to see in his eyes. There was death trauma that did something to your perspective and there was… other trauma that gave the vaguest hint of dead eyes that could haunt a person for days.

 

“Get ready.” Holding onto Robbie’s hand, she uses her quake powers to cross the distance to where Strange was as Arcade was coming down from whatever fucking area he was above them. 

 

“Now!” She yells, never letting go of his hand. Strange throws himself in after the two of them crash through back  onto the floor of the Sanctum. She rolls on her ankle real briefly, enough to bring back the feeling of vertigo

 

“Fuck,” she winces as she’s about to eat pavement. He catches her easily, the two of them crashing into each other as Strange catches his breath. She didn’t think that was normal for him either and she was glad his composure was as fucked as theirs was. Instinctively, she grabs onto Robbie’s hands to make sure that he was real, shaking off the ankle injury. 

 

“You good?” She asks the two of them, all exhaling. 

 

Strange shakes his hands. “You were in there for two days. You probably should have mentioned your friend’s predicament. Would have made the search go by a lot easier.”

 

“I’ll be sure to ask for coordinates the next time.” She rolls her eyes. Robbie’s lost that dead inside look, replaced by a haunted one. She reaches for his wrist instead, on the floor as they gather themselves. Their surroundings are blessedly normal in comparison to the various hell dimensions. It’s quiet, the dark throwing her off after that last place. Somewhere between two and three a.m, the giant clock face on the wall reads. It’s a Sunday and she has Robbie back, and she’s supposed to be back on base hours back. 

 

The Ghost Rider was in charge, this much she can tell as he flexes his hands within hers. Like they’re getting use to being in the present, reminiscent of when Andrew got HIVE out of her. The feeling of your body not being your own, doing things you remember startling clear.  His eyes lose the hardness as he looks down at her hand just as she gets herself ready to stand.

 

“Thank you, for real,” she tells Strange. “You get a get out of jail free card from SHIELD, just try not to use it so quick.” Strange looks at her, the cloak that she’s ignored hovering over him protectively or cowering behind him. She can’t really tell but it’s alive and it’s no longer the weirdest shit she’s seen. 

 

“You’re something else,” Strange scoffs before nodding, opening another portal to get them out of the Sanctum. 

 

“I’ve been told that,” she hits back, remaining close to Robbie as they go back. He leans in closer, her hands extended towards him. It hovers between them like protective shielding that he brushes with his fingertips. Instead, he watches everything around him as he gets reoriented to this time, to this earth.  

 

“You ready to go home?” She asks him, tilting her head to the side as Strange opens one last portal to get them out of the Sanctum.

 

He nods, following her lead through it. 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 iii. anabasis 

 

“You’ve been gone for 3 months, roughly,” she says, the train ride jostling and unnerving in its quiet roaring. He’d never been on a train before, having the Charger. It’s hilarious that this is the thing that’s taking him more to get used to - that he’s on a train, that’s he’s on a train with _Daisy,_ that he is no longer in that world. He’s unsettled and keen on not showing it. She looks at him with her wide eyes like she wants for him to say something before she decides against it, holding her hand to her face.

 

“I looked after Gabe. Put agents around to make sure he was alright.” 

 

He nods, looking out the window to see darkness and his own reflection reflected back at him. 

 

It’s different with her, different from that dimension; this newly alive status if he had to pinpoint it. He feels like he was put into stasis for a while, that he was both alive and dead in that dimension. If anything, it’s the getting used to his own body when he spent most time as the Rider. But some habits are hard to shake, especially when most of it was spent as the other.  It wasn’t so much the killing but that act that he feels...desensitized. An extended out of body experience. Everything was different in that world, were nearly everyone that died deserved it, archdemons feeding the Rider’s need for vengeance but there’s another feeling that trails after him like an echo that he derived...joy from it? Or was it all just the Ghost? He doesn’t know anything that separates the two of them, the line blurred until it was erased there

 

They spend the entire time left in silence. She takes him to her hotel room, pushes him towards the lone bed instead. She shakes her head when he tries to argue, gently pushing him back to the room.  

 

Tugging her jacket off, she only stops to get a spare blanket from the hotel closet and falls asleep once her head touches the cushion. He’s hyper-aware of her breathing in the room after so long of being surrounded by dead things. Monstrous things, things that weren’t quite human but almost were, the only company in that world. He moves towards the bed, pulling his own jacket off and on top of him and lies in the bed. It’s soft and another reminder of how he wasn’t here for two months that felt like two centuries. Time did go differently there but the shock is too much, he can’t even go to sleep. It’s not until somewhere between six and seven in the morning when the sunlight began to filter through the windows that he can finally close his eyes.

 

 

***

 

 

He jolts awake as she’s closing a window. He blinks, not quite sure if he slept or just went through the motion of it. 

 

“Hey, hey,” she moves towards him, placing an arm on his shoulder. “It’s okay.” He looks down at her arm; she flushes and removes it as she points to the side table. “There’s coffee. We’re leaving this afternoon back. Please try to get some sleep.” She doesn’t plead but there’s a softer tone to her words.

 

Daisy Johnson isn’t what he’d called someone who looks like she could snap you in half. She’s small, and has the impression of rings underneath her eyes as if  _ she  _ hadn’t slept for who knows how long. But she’s a commanding presence when she wants to be and she’s protective of people. He wants to fall asleep but rolls towards the other side of the bed to leave a spot open for her 

 

She quirks an eyebrow up, coffee in midair and he gestures down for her to sit. She does so, placing the coffee on the table and pushes her shoes off. Her proximity is enough to let him fall asleep once she’s right beside him, reading something on a tablet as he does so.  

 

It’s like this - the rest of the afternoon passes by in a haze and a hyper awareness of everything. The only thing that he’s certain is real, that this isn’t something in his mind, is that Daisy is here. She’s the fixed point. He doubts that his subconscious would create such an elaborate hallucination given their brief partnership but something about her called out to him like a tether, or an anchor to reality. It’s her presence that focuses him on this world. That this was real and that he wasn’t in that dimension anymore.

 

He had been saved.

 

They go on the plane, more silence filled in by the unspoken bond they replace in. She tells him of how she moved the Charger back home to Gabe. She holds his hand in hers as she gets an Lyft to go to his home. And he thinks that’s the funniest part of this event, that they’re quiet and taking a Lyft home, that they’re holding hands but not in any romantic inclination but to remind each other of the reality. He misses the feeling once she leaves him across his house before she goes back to SHIELD.

 

Life went on as usual - except for that it wasn’t, not with what he had seen, and not with how it clicks once she’s gotten him home that she’d spent two months of her own time trying to find him. Why would she even do that? He wonders as he looks for the brick. There’s a brick beside the house has the key in a broken part that’s stuck in to make it look whole. The silver of the key glints in the evening moon, the familiar click another reminder that he was  _ here,  _ that he’s in the present, that he’s back home.

 

Gabe’s face looks up in confusion as he holds a plate to his mouth before he drops it. The shattering of the plate is ignored as his brother zips to him in his wheelchair. Happiness and fear combine on him as he rolls to Robbie, reaches a hand to pinch him. 

 

He bends down to his younger brother, to put his arms around him and he lets himself let go of the tears inside as Gabe’s joyful wailing goes into his jacket as they hold each other. 

 

This made everything real. 

 

 

***

 

 

She goes back to the base, the quiet of the base and the thrum of engines still running as others worked on restoring it back in one piece. Simmons is in her room, asleep as she drops her carry on to the side, tosses her jacket to the desk and toeing her boots off. 

 

“You were supposed to be here hours ago.”

 

“I had something that came up.” Jemma’s changed a lot from the day they first met. She was mousy at the beginning, more hesitant to speak up when something was wrong. Now she was here, demanding that people not bullshit her with her no-nonsense face. “Check if I don’t have a concussion?”

 

Jemma’s eye widen, words forming at her lips before she shuts them and goes to her room for her medkit. They stand in silence, Jemma inspecting her eyes and her head. Then, she leans forward to wrap her arms around her. 

 

“It wasn’t your fault.”

 

“I know. But I made it right.” 

 

Jemma holds her in silence for a few more beats, fingers running up and down as she hold on tighter. 

 

***

 

 

The weeks pass by without so much of a hitch; he hears her name on the radio and on the tv a few times as they talk about legislation regarding Inhumans. He even catches her on the news in her SHIELD uniform at various press conferences and townhalls, the new face of the agency besides the Director guy he met.

 

His adjustment to Earth is strange, remembering the hollowness of the other world. It numbed him, to survive there and when he returned it seemed that restarted everything. Since he died, the world around him felt like he was stuck in amber. There’s something to be said about dying and returning that rearranges the bodily functions, how things like sleep and food that weren’t at the forefront suddenly were. The Ghost no longer burns from the inside out.

 

He’s still uncomfortable about the other world but they’d come to an understanding in there; he was, after all, needed to host the Spirit. But he feels that there’s a truce that they’ve finally reached with each other. The weirdness doesn’t fade but it is manageable. The second thing was readjusting to the world, and Canelo's, how they even still let him come back (he finds out from Gabe that she did one of her secret agent things about that; he doesn’t know how to feel about anything anymore but especially about her.)  It feels weird to put a time on his disappearance, to recognize that he wasn’t  _ there  _ anymore, that this is the closest he’s felt to being truly alive and present than he has in a while.

 

He’s in the shop working on autopilot, the motions of work as he lets the small tv fill the air. It cuts to a soundbite of Daisy, putting the screwdriver down as he listens. She looks regal in the black and grey of the uniform, a leader through and through.

 

She was undoubtedly one of the strangest people he’d ever meet. She was persistent and a pain in the ass, and provoking in their first meetings. But there was a saintliness to her, something that the Ghost had sensed even when it wanted blood and wanted to hear the screams as judgement was passed. She may not have believed herself to be a good person, but her actions spoke something else about her and her valiant heart something that was rare.

 

What struck him most was her fearlessness and her determination, how she’d found a way to open a dimension to find him. He knows that there was absolutely zero reason for her to go back beyond her martyr complex, but this didn’t feel like she was doing it for punishment or even absolution.  He’d never met someone as fiercely loyal as her or had someone watch out for him. 

 

Altogether, it’s a strange and new feeling.  After his parents death and even with their Uncle, it was always him and Gabe. It’s why he’d dropped out of school beyond the apathy of it all, the thrill of the racing calling more than college. Higher education meant college, meant leaving Gabe - and once he’d gotten into the accident and dragged him along, Gabe was his only priority, everything else be damned. And then there was the Ghost Rider, so it’s not like he had a large circle of people to turn to until she’d come in and made herself a way besides him. 

 

He’d conned the closest thing they would get to meeting a saint into giving a shit about him and he laughs it off during his lunch break. The incredulity of his life up until this point until it mixes with tears he had no idea were even there. His life continues on the same as it was, his night job even more bloodthirsty but also soothed after that time. It’s hard to not feel like there’s still something left to say in between them, uncharted territory that deserved to be crossed. Whatever it was, he owed her big time for that dimension rescue. 

 

 

 

***

 

 

And then the base is blown up, and SHIELD is branded a terrorist organization again with agents dead and a few commandeering a plane and in the wind. The Ghost sings inside, the other dimension giving him a finely attuned sense to everything that is mystical, that it’s almost a siren call as he senses the Darkhold’s presence stills in this world. He gets the Charger, and he guns it back to the remains of the base. 

 

 

***

 

 

He goes back to one of those hell dimensions, his own bones singing as he whips the chain to open a portal of his own. The difference between then and now is that he could control it. 

 

He spends what feels like ten years in there, trying to find a hole to throw the darkhold in and never have it returned. 

 

 

***

 

 

He comes back a week later, in the basement of SHIELD apparently once more. Someone set up an alarm in there because the sound of footsteps echoes through the walls, the thudding of three different pairs sounding as Daisy rushes in first followed by Jemma and Mack. 

 

“You’re back,” she rushes towards him. His arms come around her, the gesture awkward to him but right with her as she tightens her hug. 

 

She steps away from him abruptly as Jemma and Mack do a once-over inspection of him. He looks more haggard than ever but more whole, coming to an understanding with the Rider to work with him than take him over. 

 

She nods at him once, turning as they all walk up the stairs leading to their base that’s still under construction.

 

 

***

 

 

He doesn’t know what they are - just that he knows they’re comfortable with each other. They’re not dates. They’re informal get togethers. It’s what he tells himself every time she swings by to Canelo’s near the time that should be dinner for him, or at home, a tentative smile as she holds up whatever she decides they should eat. They do this for a few months as she goes 'I'm really not supposed to be sharing this but -' and he watches as she fills in and answer her question. If there's one thing he can tell is that she's markedly lighter. Happier even, working as the deputy director and still keeping in contact with him. 

 

The question that’s been picking at him comes out.

 

“Did anyone know you went to find me?” He asks her as she’s halfway through a take-out box. Between the two of them, they get enough to feed a family of four and she pauses to take a sip of her drink. 

 

She drums her fingers on the table they’re eating, looking at him with a knowing look. 

 

“Only Jemma knew, and I didn’t tell her that. But what did you think?”

 

He nods, watching her fingers drum and drum against the table a few inches from his hand.

 

“Why did you save me?” He asks her. Her hand stops as she mulls her answer. 

 

“Because you’re a good man,” she says quietly. “And I know you try. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t believe in you.”

 

His hand goes to hers, watching as she turns it palm up to hold his hand. They stay like this, an understanding settling inside as he considers her answer. And the more he considered it, it’s all that he needed from her. They hold hands in the silence, watching the Los Angeles sun fade as the early hours of twilight passed. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. thanks to the twitter crew and the 5 people (you know exactly who you are) that encourage my nonstop screaming  
> 2\. i've seen doctor strange twice because i was in the room and i literally did not pay attention either time so I went fast and loose with how his powers and dimension hopping works  
> 3\. also played fast and loose with the government and bureaucracy because haha we're not here for that  
> 4\. title comes from dawn golden's 'all i want'


End file.
